Sutton Bookshare

The Sutton Bookshare Takes Book Sharing Beyond the Library Walls
For centuries, people have gathered in local libraries to peruse books, share their favorite stories, and pursue greater knowledge through a centralized place that can lend books for a few days or weeks at a time. Most libraries in the modern era are free, and the only price that people pay to use them is the late fee on a book that wasn’t returned when it was due. It’s a model that has worked for a very long time, but the Internet is serving to revolutionize the library and turn it into a new, more communal venue.

The Sutton Bookshare Takes Book Sharing Beyond the Library Walls
For centuries, people have gathered in local libraries to peruse books, share their favorite stories, and pursue greater knowledge through a centralized place that can lend books for a few days or weeks at a time. Most libraries in the modern era are free, and the only price that people pay to use them is the late fee on a book that wasn’t returned when it was due. It’s a model that has worked for a very long time, but the Internet is serving to revolutionize the library and turn it into a new, more communal venue.

Sutton Bookshare and Services Like it: Moving Beyond the Community Library
The idea of a library, since its inception, has been to serve as a centralized location where readers of all stripes can peruse works of fiction and nonfiction, choosing the book that speaks to them and then read that book for free. It required leaving the home, finding a library that actually had the right book, and then establishing a relationship with the institution. While hardly inconvenient in traditional terms, the convenience of the Internet has now inspired many people to move on.

The Sutton Bookshare, though no longer located here, represents a bold new take on borrowing books. Instead of a library lending those books to readers, avid readers can now loan books to each other. The service creates an online directory of books, searchable by title as well as location, and users can contact each other to lend or exchange each title that they’re interested in.

A Virtual Community of Avid Readers
While libraries have long served as central gathering places, the person-to-person exchange of books represents a better way for books to make the rounds through a community. It’s easier than going to multiple libraries to find a book, and it’s certainly a better option than waiting weeks for someone to return the book that a reader most wants to enjoy. With services like the Sutton Bookshare, libraries are in for some really tough competition.